Market-oriented industrial capitalist production has simultaneously raised pleasurable human living standards tremendously and inflicted so much excruciating pain on humanity through pollution. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), is an internationally standardised tool for measuring the possible, real and subtle negative outcomes of industrial production as an integral component of the development of capitalism. This paper theorised on the global reality that industrial development comes with the indispensable contradictory effects of pleasure and pain. It investigated the negative dimensions or implications, in terms of a terribly devastated environment, of the celebrated wonders of capitalist industrial production in the contemporary world. It also argued that efforts at the mitigation of environmental pollution through impact assessment policies would not achieve much success due to the functional dynamics of the capitalist market that controls and directs global industrial production and consumption. It is an essentially qualitative study that relied on secondary sources of data with logical content analysis of available facts and records as its method of analysis. The theory of utilitarianism by Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill was adopted as its theoretical framework. The paper concluded that environmental impact assessment per se does not guarantee sustainable development and therefore recommended that peoples’ environmental rights should be adequately protected despite the lure of industrial investment and development.